finally!- an afternoon caught by its coattails. am currently at my regular starbucks outlet on campus, where many a study evening has been whiled away not-studying. it feels a little strange to be in new york while it’s all hot and the streets are paved with girls in long legs holding together short summer dresses. sherbert carts have sprung up like daisies overnight, and suddenly, out of nowhere, on the corner of 110th and Broadway, there’s a frail old man playing buttery tunes on a saxophone. it’s my first summer here, and it feels much like a different life.
sophomore year has come and gone, taking with it half of my college career. this year has been very long, and in some segments has been as annoying as a bad itch crawling in a corner of your skin that you can’t seem to locate. i’ve engaged so much in this span of time, and have also been moved around unwittingly (like an indignant chess piece) – but one thing remains a constant: that i am still falling into blessings. sometimes when it becomes overwhelming, i try to guess when it is that my luck will run out, but i find that for the most part i am holding my breath for nothing. surely someone as indolent and unintelligent as i am doesn’t deserve all of this? yet at the same time i’m glad that the school year is leaving. i’m a bit of a packrat, but even i can’t bear the taint from what seemed like a dirty kitchen sink that would never wash itself or go away.
summer classes have been quite fun so far, albeit tedious and entailing very many 8am alarm rings. actually, waking up at 8am is easy peas compared to the string of all-nighters that are/were native to regular school semesters– but there’s just something very inhumane and nature-inconsistent about waking up this early in the summer, this time for nautical skirts and frolicking with books in parks! and so it’s always that much harder to get up. though i swear on my Hedonist Association membership that much debauchery has been going downnnn to make up for my ante meridiem discipline. what debauchery? tales soon!
i was in Istanbul last week for a five-day flee before summer classes started. oh Istanbul: an ethereal city with higgledy-piggledy homes, destroyed so often throughout history but rebuilt and restored with such love, where people are shy and generous with their smiles, where coffee is thick and musky, and the sounds of solat punctuate the skies five times a day just like at home. i was reunited once again with my favourite judgmental friend, Timtam – but we timed our visit to coincide with Mesut’s return to Istanbul. Mesut is my other favourite judgmental friend, a fellow sophomore here at Columbia. we were doing so many of the same things and taking so many of the same classes in freshman year that we felt perhaps we should try to be friends. here, i was going to insert a funny joke about him, but i couldnt bring myself to, because he’s left me to study abroad in Paris for a year, and i miss him muchly already :( so i’ll just put up some pictures from Istanbul:
#1 tourist Timtam striking a pose for an audience of Istanbul cotton candy clouds
#2 conned a group of very excitable kids on a daytrip into taking a picture with me. with the Asian Emblem no less :D
#3 gorgeous view of the Marmara sea from a terrace at the Topkapi Palace, framed by an earnest tourist
#4 whaddup
#5 yummy turkish coffee- folds soooo nicely on the tongue. and effectively rousing, too
#6 a shelf of curios at the Grand Bazaar
#7 copper coffee serving pots
#8 this vendor said he’d give me a free shisha pipe if i went out for a drink with him, haha. i politely declined (upon timtam’s angry furtive glares), and then he offered a discount if i were to take a photo with him. why not! (sorry timtam)
#9 but i ended up not buying a pipe from him :P bought it from another store instead, for the irresistible price of $25! the unfortunate twist is that we smoked so much shisha during our 5 days in Istanbul that i now have a very strong aversion to it…
#10 windy day out in town. this is one of the many streetside ice cream vendors, and me, trying to keep my sticky ice cream upright in the wind
#11 fanning stairs of apartments near Ankara Road, against dusty white air!
#12 a comedian of a sweets vendor at the Spice Market! quite the camwhore too- we took many funny photos with him
#13 steps of a building that looked like a mosque, but surely it was a marketplace in masquerade because there was a man selling alcohol on its foyer…
#14 cerulean eyes of the man running some famous sweet shop timtam ducked into for a box of turkish delight
#15 at the Eminonu ferry docks, where we boarded a ferry that chugged us along the Bosphorus!
#16 onboard the ferry, sipping tea and feeling excited. portrait artfully composed by Timtam
#17 timtam and mesut
#18 us three. gorgeous day out for us and seagulls! portrait artfully composed by me
#19 mesoot gool, kaninabeh?
#20 whispering couple on the ferry! and our empty glasses of turkish apple tea, which is delicious – like apple juice with a round, thick, heavy finish
#21 flags on women on Istiklal Street. not sure who the dude is. Ataturk maybe? it was a public holiday that day, which explained all the flags around the city, much to Mesut’s displeasure
the above is a photo of all the stuff i have in new york city, sitting sadly on the morning sidewalk waiting to be placed in summer storage for several months. all this stuff was accumulated over the past two years that i’ve been in college, and has quadrupled in spread since the last time i moved out for summer, which was exactly a year ago. it’s amazing how much junk i’ve amassed in the span of one year, and then two years. all these cases of unused stationery, baking tins and carefully pressed class notes seemed to appear out of nowhere as i was frantically packing. try as i did to grasp at straws, some things simply had no genealogy. but now suddenly they all have to be wrapped and put away in boxes, rolling up an old year and nestling away to await the new one.
so much has changed from a year ago. i’m currently in the foreign eternal city of Rome, where people smoke way too much, as well as make out way too much, sometimes simultaneously. i’ve been sleeping a lot. and skipping across sheer lakes of indescribable certainty. everything is perfect. i’m getting just a little sick of eating pasta, but besides that, yes, everything is wonderful. plus i’ve been having for breakfast some delicious yau char kwai from the chinese restaurant just up the street from the inn i’m staying at – and that’s always a good reason to rejoice.
i’m glad sophomore year is over. it’s been good in so many ways, and so busy, and so full of life, but i’m very ready for it to be gone. in four months i will return to college as a junior. half of my college career will have been over. it seems to me like just yesterday i was writing about how i’d procrastinated over studying for the SATs and surely i must be so screwed! but here i am. in some school, in some city, this many years later, doing way too much math than is necessary for happiness. pah. if i close my eyes i can sometimes bring myself back to that time. but two months ago i found this fork in the road and i picked it up. i’m not sure what’s going to happen but i want to keep staying tuned. i have so many stories but i dont know where to start. maybe i wont cos i’m lazy, and it’s 7am here now, which means it’s time for me to go to bed :) i’m so sleepy. so, goodnight! tanti baci da roma.
my last final paper of the semester is due in two hours, and i’m something like 4 pages short of the minimum page requirement and about 20 pages short of a kick ass paper. so i’ve kind of given up. no wonder at all that my grade point average will never converge to a 4.0. but you know, sometimes i think it could, if i would just stop procrastinating, start getting on my shit a little earlier, and learn how to focus during crunch times like these. but what have i been doing in the past two hours? scrolling through facebook photos of people i miss. watching snippets of my favourite movies on netflix (for inspiration, konon). listening to the elephant love medley over and over again, and howling “WE COULD BE HEROES! just for one day…!” on my friends’ walls. logging into FRIENDSTER and curiously looking at old photos of old friends. reading about the Official Monster Raving Loony Party of the UK. researching places to visit in Rome (i’m leaving tomorrow!). dissolving into fits of giggles at arthur’s facebook status asking quite seriously how to say seal in Malay — the funniest answer being “encik heidi klum”. trying to figure out which HK star it is that martian’s friend adrian looks like. resuming my lifelong quest to find a “right song” for each of my best friends; so far only joe has a song, and it’s obviously the sound of silence by S&G. trying to finish my letter of polished sarcasm to our beloved Home Minister, about the exact shade of pink i got my toenails done in when my bag was snatched outside my house and the bounce in my mom’s freshly pressed curls when the cops told her to ‘balik tongsan’ when she went to lodge a report about her own mugging. walking one too many times over to starbucks for coffee refills. trying to get my desktop background image of a very sexy brigitte bardot to just the right shade of black and white… and all sorts of other frivolous things. life is so much more fun this way! omg will this paper just write itself already?
as i catch that lightning fast flash glimpse of you in the photograph from the reflection in the car, i am falling into you… and it seems that is always what i’m thinking of, as you look at me and i look up and there is all this sound of the air of the whooshing of us as our lives brush past each other, in friction and in silky smooth destiny, where there are seagulls, and there is life as it stays held lovingly by our comfort, and all of the ease that we have makes our hair float
perhaps my most consequential handicap is my inability to make choices and never look back. such certainty and self-confidence in my own decision-making seems almost fictional to me sometimes, and i always watch with marked admiration people who know immediately what they want and how to get it. democracy is valuable to me and so i like to get everyone’s input, but most of the time i’m convinced that there is already a best solution somewhere out there that i am simply uneducated about; a median answer of sorts that i can arrive at only if i can find it in a large enough sample of opinions. and so i waffle and i ask and i table and i discuss, and after long last i finally arrive at that predestined best solution. it’s a long and redundant process, but at least at the end of the day there is an answer. yet, i don’t feel a sense of closeness to the outcome, because i didn’t recognize it from the outset. if something were meant to be, you would know it immediately the moment it presents itself to you, right? or maybe not, but most best solutions in the world seem to me to be that way: you come across something and you instantly know. sometimes if i’m lucky this does happen, and then i don’t look back when i make that decision. but like i said before, this happens so rarely that it feels almost fictional. and then of course sometimes i am wrong. i think i knew, but i didnt really. but nevertheless, i still follow my instincts when i encounter something that calls out to me. things that require some deliberation are not, then, the best outcome. by gradation, the more deliberation something requires, the less good it must be. but maybe sometimes our process of deliberation adds some kind of value in the sub-optimal outcome, and after some time, with all that imbued additional value, that outcome eventually emerges to be better than all the others.
May 4th, 2010
Su Ann
Su Ann is a 21 year old Malaysian jabberwocky currently studying in New York. Still an optimist with a penchant for pessimism and shoe shopping. More?
Contact at : im.suann[at]gmail[dot]com
Quaintly.net
Quaintly is how I'd like to live my life, which would be quite like a movie, or a mellow book. This blog eschews capitalization because it is irrelevant unless used for proper nouns; but sometimes even when used for proper nouns, it is irrelevant as well. More?
